Git history and branches

Complete navigation #

1. With Git focus press F8 for HEAD history or F9 for branches. The palette offers both actions from other panes.
2. Enter on a branch opens commits; on a commit opens its files; on a file opens a read-only diff tab.
3. Esc in the right pane returns through files → history → branches where applicable → local changes. Diff tabs remain open.

Pages and stable revisions #

Loads 100 commits per page and offers Load more without a preset total cap. The revision is pinned by SHA during pagination so new commits do not shift results. Loaded pages remain in memory.

F5 may fetch and rebuild the current view from the reference, resetting pages and selection. History uses date ordering; H shows/hides abbreviated SHA and D shows/hides dates (both initially visible and configurable in keyboard.bindings). Long selected subjects scroll.

What all branches means #

Lists locally known refs/heads and refs/remotes, omitting symbolic refs such as origin/HEAD. It does not include tags or independently discover every branch on the server. It does not check out branches.

History covers the entire selected repository; files in each commit are filtered to the workspace when a Git subfolder was opened. Some commits may have no visible files. For detected nested repositories, their files and Git-computed +/- counts are shown.

Historical reading and limits #

• Stage, unstage, discard, commit, pull and push are blocked while browsing history or branches. F5 still allows fetch: navigation does not check out, but fetch updates refs.
• A root commit is compared with an empty tree; a merge is compared with its first parent. There is no parent selector or combined diff.
• An unborn repository returns empty history; detached HEAD is supported. Available history depends on local objects, including shallow-clone depth.